What Happened to Nasty Gal?

Capital Thinking • Issue #139 • View online

On Shark Tank, Kevin O’Leary often asks a pitching entrepreneur what would happen to their company if they walked out of the studio and got hit by a buss.

The macabre questioning is good for TV, but it gets at something too, something Nasty Gal never answered.

Nike was never Phil Knight. Harry’s was never Andy Katz-Mayfield. Instagram was never, hold on, let me Google it…Kevin Systrom.

Nasty Gal was Sophia Amoruso. She did a good job, probably about as good a job as one person can.

- Mike Dariano

This is a great article by Mike D. that offers a fair analysis of Nasty Gal’s fall from grace, Better yet, he actually lets you in on what they did right as well as where they went off the rails.

Here’s Mike:

Nasty Gal filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. This surprised me. It looked like Nasty Gal was a good company, Amoruso was #53 on the Forbes self-made richest women list, and I even linked to her book a bunch of times! What the hell happened?

In my book about startups that failed, there were 6 themes to the mistakes:

1. Failure to understand customers.
2. Failure to manage money.
3. Failure of strategy.
4. Failure of key skills.
5. Back luck.
6. Bad teams.

Let’s use those things as a template to see what parts Nasty Gal got right and wrong.

Read more from Mike Dariano in the link below ==>